The New York Times reports today that states are gearing up for a fight over the renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act. The law, which tries to introduce accountability into schools through federally-mandated testing, has sparked opposition from those who oppose a federal role in education and those who think NCLB creates too much testing. What’s most interesting about this coming battle is that the positions the parties have taken are a great example of the kind of thinking that represented the late 20^th century – and that kind of thinking isn’t good enough for the 21^st century.

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From a friend...

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Of course the Speaker is well within her rights, and tradition, to make herself acquainted with foreign leaders, and in particular to become informed about such problematic areas as the Middle East. The attacks on her are still another attempt to change the subject from Iraq to anything at all.

The subject won't let itself be changed. Senator McCain, who I admire and like in many ways, has, I fear, doomed his campaign by tying himself to the sinking ship of the Iraq war. Governor Romney, obviously the most formidable of the Republican candidates based on brains, money, looks and outside status, runs the risk of making the same blunder. Other Republicans, especially those in the Senate and the House, will find that they simply cannot stay in support of this occupation through November 08. The White House won't like to bring the troop force down, but they will have to start that process before the election. And the Democrats will be obliged to continue to press for withdrawal. All that because of popular opinion. Democracy, for all its flaws, has one big thing going for it: the people feel empowered, and that makes their opinions valuable.

You know what they say: no good deed goes unpunished.

That is certainly the case with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her visit to Syria.

At a time (the Easter-Passover recess) when dozens of House members and Senators are visiting foreign capitals and discussing policy with foreign leaders, Pelosi is being skewered for, in the words of the Washington Post's editors, "substituting her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican President."

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This is an absolutely fascinating article. The bottom line:

For the first time ever, more poor Americans live in the suburbs than in all our cities combined.

Harold Ford deserves credit for participating in this sort of forum. He has only responded on two points, which admittedly is more than most politicians do, but his response leaves a lot to the imagination.

On trade, he says he and his colleagues are "looking for ways to combine a basically pro-trade strategy with a "new social contract." Since this is the ideas primary and not slogan-mongering, we have to ask, what in the world does that mean? It could be a lot of things. What is in this new social contract, who signs it, and who enforces it?

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Over a decade ago, Richard Rorty published an incisive review essay on Stephen Carter’s second book, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion. The essay is titled “Religion as Conversation-stopper,” and in it, Rorty registers his disbelief at the idea that there is a culture of disbelief in the United States:

Carter puts in question what, to atheists like me, seems the happy, Jeffersonian compromise that the Enlightenment reached with the religious. This compromise consists in privatizing religion -- keeping it out of what Carter calls “the public square,” making it seem bad taste to bring religion into discussions of public policy. . . . We atheists, doing our best to enforce Jefferson’s compromise, think it bad enough that we cannot run for public office without being disingenuous about our disbelief in God; despite the compromise, no uncloseted atheist is likely to get elected anywhere in the country. We also resent the suggestion that you have to be religious to have a conscience -- a suggestion implicit in the fact that only religious conscientious objectors to military service go unpunished. Such facts suggest to us that the claims of religion need, if anything, to be pushed back still further, and that religious believers have no business asking for more public respect than they now receive.

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Response to Harold Ford: Eliminating corporate studies and actually putting a market price on pollution are not exactly radical corporate regulations-- hell, The Economist and honest capitalists who believe prices should reflect costs are with the DLC there, so I'm unconvinced.

But let me bring front and center Mr. Ford's proposal that I find more than "intriguing" but a radically progressive position that if Mr. Ford is serious, I'll give him serious props. Not paid family leave, where the DLC is in pretty mainstream company, but his speech where he said:

Major employers should promise parents who leave to raise a child that their job will still be waiting for them any time over the next five years.

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33 days from now will be the 12th anniversary of a short speech on US-Cuba policy that Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) gave on the floor of the United States Senate.

He charged then President Bill Clinton with keeping US-Cuba policy a "captive of Cold war mentality." Bingaman, then, said times had changed and America needed a new policy course -- particularly in travel and humanitarian measures designed to promote intra-family contact between Cuban and Cuban-American families. That was more than a decade ago. Times have changed even more now.

Senator Bingaman's speech is worth reading in full, just to get a quick snap-shot of how little US-Cuban policy realities have changed:

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I appreciate the volume of response to my initial post, in the comment threads, and in follow-up posts. And I appreciate the passionate - even if off-based - criticism of the DLC. But we should all remember that the DLC played an instrumental role in giving Bill Clinton - then an Arkansas governor - a policy platform to campaign on and from in 1991. The fact is, the DLC's support for fiscally responsible and inclusive public policy to protect families, educate kids and strengthen our nation's security is long-standing.

Also, I would remind the DLC critics who believe that we never criticize the Bush administration and support its major domestic and foreign policies that the DLC and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, has published millions of words admonishing the administration on just about every issue.

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You have to read today's Washington Post editorial on Speaker Pelosi's visit to Damascus to believe it.

Actually, maybe not. The Post's editorial page has been strongly in the neocon camp ever since Fred Hiatt took over.

Nevertheless, this blistering attack on Pelosi for going to Syria (echoing the White House talking points) hits a new low.

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The United Nations will vote this week whether to grant "supervised" independence to Kosovo. It is a good time to review the developments in Kosovo since 1999, which highlight the dire consequences of excessively ambitious long-distance social engineering and centralism in name of nation-building and the pitfalls of imported regime designs.

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The problems many of us have with the DLC is summarized in the fact that in Harold Ford's list of six challenges, he includes "Holding Government Accountable for Results" but nothing about holding corporations accountable. Which reflects many peoples' beef not just with the policy the DLC promotes, but the sense that it reflects its corporate funders' interests more than the grassroots needs of the population (although Ford does discuss a surprisingly radical pro-family proposal in his linked speech, something I'll come back to).

The DLC's policies seems tailored to dump the costs of the capitalist economy onto taxpayers -- while not demanding that the corporate sector pay its fair share of taxes -- while leaving profits of that economy in the hands of society's winners in an increasingly unequal society. That may be admitedly better than doing nothing for those losing out in the global economy, but it does reflect the interests of a certain sector of the business community more than democratic interests.

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I have high regard for Harold Ford, and no doubt that the U.S. Senate would be better were he in it presently. I also think well of many of those whom he mentions in his DLC speech, like Governor O'Malley in Maryland, for instance, who has, without doubt, brought new ideas not only to state government but to rethinking --and recommiting to a safer and more equitable and opportunity-filled urban life for all when he was Mayor of Baltimore.

As someone who doesn't count herself as one of the DLC supporters (to say the least), I have respect for much of their leadership and for the fact that they have tried to imbue the Democratic Party with new ideas to make the Party competitive and majoritarian again. I also do think that there is more agreement than not between the DLCers and those of us who hail from the more progressive, pro-labor (rather than pro-business) side of the Party. I think that there's more consensus on trade today than there was previously, and the DLC has now gone on record in support of union organizing and workers' rights as in the Employee Free Choice Act, a shift for the DLC away from avoiding or even dissing unions, and an important shift in my mind toward figuring out how to marry policy with people.

But, here's where I begin to have trouble. It's in some words in Ford's speech where he calls for a party that is "pro-family, pro-business, pro-America, pro-defense, pro not only trade but smart trade..."

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Harold Ford's initial post calling for a search for common ground among Democrats has so far generated a constructive if argumentative post from Max Sawicky, and a couple of hundred or so comments full of everybody's stored-up grievances towards the DLC and/or Ford's 2006 Senate campaign. I guess that's cathartic, and thus healthy. But maybe we can get on soon to the question Ford raised: what, specifically, do we need to work out to have a solid progressive agenda for 2008?

Maybe we could start with the six challenges Ford laid out, and for each, specific questions it raises among progressives.

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As someone involved in jousts with DLC folks for 15 years, albeit as a non-entity on a low-or-no-profile level, I'd like to welcome Rep Ford's invitation to establish common ground. The truth is the Democrats without both the DLC and everyone to its left are not politically viable as a national party at this time. Liberals can wish and work towards the day when the DLC will be dispensable, but we aren't there. The diplomatic way to put it is, let's try and achieve some consensus and go forward.

It really is about ideas -- not what the DLC thinks, but what the American people think. Because what they think is not well-founded. Would you like a partial list? They think we ought to balance the budget. They thought Iraq was in the process of going nuclear (as they think now, about Iran). They think Saddam was in league with Al Qeda. They thought there was something wrong with the fact that Rep. Ford was not married or living in a monastery. Etc.

Like other politicians, not excluding liberals, the DLC wants to win elections so they are tempted to tell people what they want to hear, and that of course is based on what they already think.

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Bush wants the American people to believe that by letting White House staff converse informally with a few members of Congress, without a record of what was said, and not under oath he will have enabled the legislative branch of the government to do its oversight job

The Democrats believe telling the American people that by setting a time table for withdrawal from Iraq they are not limiting the military because they are setting goals but not timelines.

"Come on!" - to both. All you achieve is to make the public more disgusted with Washington and more alienated from politics.

Did you know that making less money than men is a good thing? Oh, you like paying the bills and feeding your kids? Well don't fret, Carrie Lukas is here to set you straight!

Lukas, the vice president of the anti-feminist organization the Independent Women's Forum, has a column in today's Washington Post assuring women that the wage gap is "a bargain." No seriously, she swears.

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By the time Congress left town for Easter recess last week, both the House and the Senate had adopted Fiscal Year 2008 federal budget resolutions. The two resolutions were remarkably similar and, in fact, closely tracked the budget proposed by President Bush in early February. All three budgets called for about $2.9 trillion in spending next year. They all claimed to produce surpluses by the year 2012. The spending increases they proposed in the next fiscal year were all within four percent of each other in real terms. And none called for tax increases.

There were two notable differences. First, the president’s budget assumed that Congress would enact new legislation to extend all of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, whereas the House and Senate plans assume that they would expire in 2011, as the law current reads. Second, both the House and Senate resolutions propose a pay-as-you-go (or PAYGO) rule requiring that new entitlement spending or tax cuts would need to be "deficit neutral," that is, paid for by offsetting tax increases or spending cuts. The president's budget does not.

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I want to begin by thanking everyone involved in TPMCafe with this opportunity for a serious discussion of how we can all promote a progressive and politically powerful agenda for the country. I hope my appearance here will promote that discussion, which, as I explained in a speech last week, will be the main focus of my chairmanship of the Democratic Leadership Council during the run-up to the 2008 presidential campaign.

It's no secret that in some parts of the progressive blogosphere, the DLC has attained bogey-man status based on what I can only describe as a distorted view of the organization's history, and its alleged present status as a pillar of the Washington political establishment.

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The Drum Major Institute released a report this week finding that it is harder than ever for New York families to break into the middle class in the first instance and to stay there once they've arrived.

The report specifies that high rents and high standard of living benchmarks (paralleling much of what Professor Warren discusses in The Two-Income Trap) are serious barriers to achieving middle class status. DMI proposes several policy solutions, including a more progressive tax structure, universal pre-kindergarten, and broader access to health insurance.

The Times has an interesting political take on yesterday's DMI forum to discuss the report's findings.

While John McCain was excoriating the press in Baghdad yesterday for not presenting the "full story" about how swell things are in Iraq he neglected to mention the pre-visit security sweep that made that neighborhood stroll so safe. I am sure you have already heard about the 100 soldiers, the three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships that accompanied his entourage, but did you hear about the soldiers who swept the area before the American legislators and their security team showed up? Who cares about those mooks? They are expendable.

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Please send DVD of Gore's Inconvenient Truth to Justices Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas.

I appreciate Zach's focus on organizers listening to people, but that's just emphasizing that the real dichotomy has never been Leninists versus Alinskites, but good organizers versus failed organizers.

Every successful organizer -- be they a Communist, civil rights campaigner, neighborhood organizer or religious fundamentalist building a mega-church -- has always tapped the intelligence and leadership of those they are seeking to organize.

There are admittedly lots of bad organizers out there, but no decent organizer would disagree that identifying local leaders is THE essential part of organizing. But Zach's hailing of "the People" begs the question of what organizers actually DO.

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We got another interesting guest for you this week.

Starting tomorrow, Democratic Leadership Council Chair Harold Ford, Jr. will join us to discuss the DLC's policy plans for the 2008 primary. I'm expecting a lively discussion.

Predictions?

Organizers these days tend to fall into one of two camps. The first are followers of Saul Alinsky, who is being remembered in this TPMCafe thread. They believe their job is not to lead, but to teach The People how to lead themselves (by practicing “leadership development” and “consciousness raising”). The other camp believes their job is to steamroller The People into doing what’s best for them (because they are not capable of leading themselves).

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